Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats challenges the usefulness of accepted literary categories—genre, tone, theme—by its tendency to slip out from under their heavy-handed application. With this risk in mind, I shall examine Eliot’s Book as an example of satire, a descendant perhaps of the seventeenth-century "characters," conveying through the manipulation of perspectives an oblique commentary on human society and its conventions.

Elizabeth Sewell reminds us of Eliot’s debt to the nonsense mode of Lewis Carroll. She sees the Book of Practical Cats as a receptacle for all the "love and charity" excised from Eliot’s serious existential statements—a sort of immersion in the otherwise destructive element, nonsense, as the ultimate way to reach heaven.¹ The metaphysical or "theological eddies" in the poems can be, I think, easily overstated. Rather, I would emphasize the word "practical" as the qualifier of "cats," asserting the indomitable pragmatism (in contrast to dogmatism) that distinguishes the concrete world of satire. Eliot’s own "Lines for an Old Man," in which he figuratively embraces the cat-like in himself, gives a more accurate sense of Old Possum’s tone than the mellowed love suggested by Elizabeth Sewell. Here he presents himself as a tiger, not ferocious and archetypal, but rather trapped and irritable. The satirist’s function as scourge involves, then, a complex attitude:

In the opening poem, "The Naming of Cats," Old Possum’s tone is probably most "affectionate." He maintains a deferential manner towards -these secretive, superior creatures who know their own "deep and inscrutable singular"³ names and identities as we humans can hardly manage to do. All is honorific, but implicit in Old Possum’s deference is a warning against condescending to these felines or taking their activities lightly. It is rather like Pope with his sylphs and gnomes: they should be introduced with all due respect, approached delicately and with awe. But once we fully accept and thus enter their world, when we get down to tabulating their exploits, we find that this world can accommodate a range of responses, from wry appreciation to fear and outrage.

The following twelve cat-portraits, then, exploit a variety of satiric structures. As potential metaphor, the cat may in one case image a human

type and in another evoke a perspective deliberately opposed to conventional human activity. For example, in the complementary portraits "Gus: the Theatre Cat," the has-been, and "Bustopher Jones: the Cat about Town," confident he will "last out" his time, the irony springs from the human characteristics reflected in the social behavior of the cats. Gus regales his clubmates "if someone else pays,! With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days," while Bustopher, in "fastidious black, is so well-preserved because he’s observed! All his life a routine." The follies of Gus and Bustopher are taken for granted; these cats are secure in a one-dimensional world, qualified only gently by the eruption of puns in Gus’s portrait ("The gallery once gave him seven cat-calls") and by the catalogue of in-places in Bustopher’s, ironically implying the literal perspective: the cat-snob, an anal-obsessive, is dining on Pall Mall garbage.

In "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer," on the other hand, the satiric structure is more complicated. These notorious operators represent an elusive underworld defiantly antagonistic to human society, whose only response to each feline offensive is the helpless, "And there’s nothing at all to be done about that." Throughout the portrait, the human world is developed in alternate stanzas in unfavorable contrast to the attractive freedom of the cats. The second stanza, describing the small destructions wreaked on the house (an image with symbolic resonance in Eliot), culminates in a derisive reference to one of the girls’ "Woolworth pearls." The fourth stanza assembles the whole family primed for Sunday dinner, "With their minds up that they wouldn’t get thinner," and then sweeps "Argentine joint, potatoes and greens" - out from under their watering mouths with the cook’s implausible, "I’m afraid you must wait and have dinner tomorrow!" thanks to Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer. The final stanza further deflates the human values with an almost Popean thematic rhyme:

Thus, as Northrop Frye might say, the world in "Gus" and "Bustopher" is not "displaced," and beyond the literal level it functions as microcosm for a human society which is not seriously under attack.⁴ Old Possum’s tone echoes bemused acceptance, the implicit, prudent "Take note!" of low-norm satire. "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer" presents a new satiric phase in which the conventional world is displaced, a way of life is established in opposition to it, and Old Possum’s function as scourge is bestowed on the new hero: the eiron as successful rogue, a descendant of Reynard the Fox, who ridicules conventional human society without setting up any positive standard. These two possibilities for satire are, in fact, implicit in Eliot’s summary "The Ad-dressing of Cats." In his Old

Possum voice, simply pointing out an incorrigible but amusing world, he comments:

But as he proceeds to the ad-dressing of cats, he himself slips into a ridiculous posture, playing up their inscrutable, unpredictable power:

He proffers little tokens of esteem, for a cat requires evidence of respect:

Eliot’s shift between these two satiric phases creates a loose structure for the Book as a whole. To introduce his portraits, he appoints the do-good Gumbie; to conclude, he presents the well-organized Skimbleshanks, bolstered by the immediately preceding whimsical pair, Gus and Bustopher. In each, it is the analogy rather than the antithesis between feline and human behavior that is ultimately stressed; their world recalls the very world we accept and comfortably inhabit. The ineffectuality of Gumbie Cat’s projects for domestic organization is simply amusing, for her antagonists consist of harmless, though ill-mannered, cockroaches and mice. Convinced that there is no such thing as a bad household pest, she typifies the permissive, liberal mentality whose solution to "idle and wanton destroyment" by cockroaches is to shape them into a troop of boy scouts. In political contrast stands the last portrait of Skimbleshanks’ smoothly administered authority:

Although this benevolent dictator is doubtless a cat after Eliot’s own heart, his reassuring conservatism is not without its covert sting. The price of law and order is implied in the reductive perspective of the third stanza, in which humans are compared first to animals, as their Pullman berths become "little dens," then to primitive ignorants in a new-fangled world, and finally to prisoners. Old Possum describes the accommodations available on the Skimbleshanks express:

And we recall that Skimbleshanks doesn’t like hilarity and pranks.

These portraits of the milder low-norm satire buffer the affectionate framing addresses of Old Possum against the gallery of rogues that threaten with chaos the displaced world of the body of the Book. Gumbie’s microcosm lacks effective social controls; Skimbleshanks’ suffers from too many. Neither flaw is seriously dysfunctional. The central portraits of the Book, however, develop the theme of social control from another perspective. In these, we find Eliot exploring with a certain exuberance the forces of social disruption, uncontrollable, perhaps incorrigible.

Like the denial from the Marabar Caves, confusion and disaster in this displaced world stream from a central vacancy, the criminal par excellence, Macavity. Macavity draws on numerous associations and recollections, from Gay’s Macheath to James Whitcomb Riley’s goblins, from the oriental god of positive absence to the children’s Mr. Nobody. His defiance of "the Law" establishes in the end his non-presence as The Law, a sort of inexplicable inefficiency on the domestic scene, and then more ominously in the bureaucracies responsible for activity on national and international levels. Eliot’s tag-line for this phenomenon: "Macavity’s not there."

Eliot hints at an elaborate underworld drama unfolding around this vacant center. A more conventionally conspicuous predecessor, perhaps, Growltiger is overthrown early in the Book through the cooperation of the seductive Griddlebone, who is later disclosed as an agent of Macavity’s. Supporting the reign of the new criminal czar, dedicated to perpetrating disorder and distress in the human world, are the deliberate nuisance, Rum Tum Tugger, who likes nothing more than a "horrible muddle," Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, as well as the delightful Deuteronomy. This aged beast is elevated to the status of law by the villagers (an offense, perhaps, against the second law forbidding idolatry), but his "authority" means chaos and compromise in the daily activity of his human worshippers. A comic sidekick for Macavity is Mistoffelees, whose "character" gradually refutes the serious, diabolical evil suggested by his name. Like Macavity, he excels in "performing surprising illusions / And creating eccentric confusions," but his "singular magical powers" spring from the myopia of his human masters: "not long ago this phenomenal Cat / Produced seven kittens right out of a hat!" Miss Toffelees!

In the midst of this disrupted world, we discover two possible solutions to the problem of social control. Far beyond the low-norm extremes of the unrecognized do-too-good, Gumbie, and the not-so-benevolent dictator, Skimbleshanks, breathes the GREAT RUMPUSCAT. He is explicitly dissociated from the conventional means of authority, the police

dog and the fire brigade. And we note that as he, the eiron, approaches the stature of divine avenger (he looks to the sky before he gives his great leap), the displaced world is reduced literally from the human to the canine. Thus absent for the first forty-odd lines of barking, he asserts in the last ten lines his spectacular presence and dissolves the scene into empty silence.

"The Song of the Jellicles" suggests another transcendental solution to the problem of social control. While the Great Rumpuscat restores order by the miracle, heroic or divine, of his appearance, the undifferentiated Jellicles evoke the perspective as well as the image of romanticized childhood, where order is natural and not yet lost. The Jellicles don’t see or make problems; they just live to dance. The syntax of their song is simple: a succession of declarative, repetitive statements in parallel. These cats are clear-cut and manageable: "black and white," "rather small," "not too big." They are pleasant and predictable: they "jump like a jumping.jack." If, as Elizabeth Sewell suggests, they provide a "clear image of heaven,"⁵ they and their verse are also rather simplistic and banal and offer a weak antidote to the company of fallen rogues that surrounds them.

Two possibilities for satire are balanced in Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats. The cats of the framing portraits mirror human foibles; their world, as a microcosm of human society, becomes the vehicle for its oblique presentation. The cats of the middle portraits, on the other hand, are inscrutable and unpredictable by human standards. Energetically perverse, they compose a sub-society of conspiring outsiders and provide a deflating perspective on the habitual lives of their alleged human masters. These rogues are the attractive nucleus of Eliot’s Book. Indeed, it is tempting to find his Book the receptacle not for all the "love and charity" excised from his serious work, but rather for all the mischief and muddle that could find no place in the ordered universe of a classicist, royalist, and Anglo Catholic.

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

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